Ruben van Heerden. Photo: Gallo Images.
Former Junior Springbok lock Ruben van Heerden made rugby headlines for the wrong reasons the past weekend.
The 20-year-old second rower, who earned rave reviews in last year’s Currie Cup, was subbed after just 22 minutes during the Bulls rousing comeback victory over the Jaguares at Loftus.
It’s virtually unheard of that a coach would substitute a player so early in a game tactically but then again, Bulls coach John Mitchell is known for being a hard taskmaster.
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Van Heerden was drafted in at the eleventh hour after Springbok lock Jason Jenkins pulled up with a calf injury, explaining perhaps to an extent why the rookie looked so overawed on defence.
Mitchell believed the Argentinians were targeting him and decided to take him off for the sake of a morale-boosting win.
But how fragile will that leave Van Heerden’s confidence?
“It isn’t a nice thing to do, but unfortunately I’m not in the job of compassion. I can deal with compassion with the athlete post game. But to be totally fair you have to understand that is what we are employed to do as coaches,” said an unapologetic Mitchell.
“He’s a young player and he is in the squad but he hasn’t been with us a lot. The standard in the club is a chop tackle and that standard is also a shoulder on. You have to complete your tackles and at the end of the day if you continue to give them rhythm they would have hurt us.”
The decision seemed justified as the Bulls recovered from 0-19 down to triumph 43-34.
“If you look at it, it wasn’t a great start defensively but it was one channel which was costing us, so hence I made the change,” said Mitchell.
“Unfortunately as a coach you have to act, and it is not a nice thing to do, but you have to act because that channel went down the flash side, and that was one players’ responsibility, and in the next situation we didn’t adjust. So yeah I made the change and as you can see as the game went on, we started hitting them behind the gain line.”
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